‘Idol’ winner Nick Fradiani brings his pop music to TCAN

Wednesday

Mar 22, 2017 at 7:47 PMMar 22, 2017 at 7:47 PM

By Ed Symkus, Daily News Correspodnent

His name is familiar because he was the winner on Season 14 of “American Idol,” nabbing the top spot after belting out “Beautiful Life,” a song written for him by Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba. Since that May, 2015, victory, Nick Fradiani, a Connecticut native and Wheaton College graduate, has gone on to record the 2016 album “Hurricane” and is currently laying down new tracks for his next project. Fradiani is also doing a number of live dates with his band, stopping at The Center for Arts in Natick on March 31.

But the 31-year-old singer-guitarist-pianist is no overnight sensation. He’s been plying his craft, in one way or another, since he got a drum set when he was 2, and first got up on a stage to sing not long after that. Well, he didn’t exactly sing at that point.

“My father, also named Nick, is a musician,” said Fradiani. “He used to play the cruise ships. I would sometimes go along on the ships when I was very young and I would go up onstage and sing along to what he was doing with a mike that wasn’t on. The first time I remember really singing in front of people was in a fourth grade talent show.”

It was about two years later that Fradiani’s grandmother bought him an electric guitar.

“I was listening to punk rock at the time,” he recalled, “and I learned three or four chords. I did that for a couple of years, but then I got hooked into sports, and dropped off from playing guitar.”

But he didn’t stop completely. As a high school senior, he got an acoustic guitar, and brought it with him when he left for Wheaton where he “messed around” with it.

“I was playing basketball, and at the end of my freshman year, I got a bad ankle injury, and couldn’t play any sports,” he said. “So for about two weeks, all I did was play guitar, and I got really good at it pretty quickly. That summer, my dad started getting me gigs around Connecticut, playing cover songs at bar gigs, and by the next year I was pretty solid. It was also during my sophomore year that I started getting serious about writing songs.”

Right out of college, Fradiani joined his first band, a quartet that also featured his dad, playing cover songs by, among others, the Beatles, the Eagles, and Tom Petty.

“That lasted only a year,” he said, “but it taught me how to play with a band. Right after that, in 2011, I started Beach Avenue.”

That pop-rock band released a couple of EP and singles, got to open for acts ranging from Jefferson Starship to Third Eye Blind, and had an appearance on “America’s Got Talent.” Then Fradiani made the difficult decision to go it alone.

“That was tough on the guys in the band,” he said, “because things had started to move in the right direction. We were about four years in and we were starting to see some sales. We were making a little money and were playing gigs that weren’t embarrassing anymore (laughs). But that was when I told them I was going to try ‘American Idol.’ ”

Fradiani made it through to become the winner, then almost immediately afterward went out on the road as part of the cross-country “American Idol Live!” tour, which featured the final top five singers.

“That was so much better than doing the TV show,” he said. “Being on a reality singing show is not exactly reality music. They call your name, you run up there, you put your mic on, you’re a little panicky, you’ve got the band up there, you’re live, you’ve gotta know where the camera is, and it’s one, two, three, boom! You sing for 90 seconds, and you’ve gotta bring people to their knees in those 90 seconds. That’s kind of weird. But going on tour, it was fun to play full songs and have a little set. I had a great time doing that.”

Winning the show also got Fradiani signed to Big Machine Records, which resulted in the album “Hurricane.” But he and Big Machine parted ways – amicably, he pointed out – earlier this year, mainly because they are a country label, and he is a pop singer. He’s hoping that the TCAN date will spotlight his versatility.

“It’ll be an acoustic show,” he said. “We’ll have a mandolin player, the pianist also plays harmonica on some songs, I’ll have a guitar player, and a cajón player, and I’ll sing and play some piano and guitar. We’ll do songs from the solo record, but I still like to do some things that I’d written earlier, so we’ll also play songs from Beach Avenue. And we’ll probably do a couple of covers. Maybe ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ by Petty, and maybe ‘The Downeaster “Alexa”,’ which is one of Billy Joel’s lesser-known songs.

“I’m building a new team around me,” he added. “We’ve been in the studio for the past couple of months working on a new project, so I’ll also be doing a brand new song called ‘We Live Forever.’ ”

Nick Fradiani performs at The Center for Arts in Natick on March 31 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $35. Info: 508-647-0097.

Upcoming concert and club dates

March 25:

Brazilian-born, New York-based singer-pianist Eliane Elias features pieces from her newest album “Made in Brazil” at Berklee Performance Center in Boston. (8 p.m.)

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